


This Life Chose Me

by In_agony_and_ecstasy



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Domestic, Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual!Eren, Bullying, Coming Out, Cyber Bullying, Falling In Love, Flashbacks, Fluff, Happy Ending, Homophobia, Jean likes to read, Loneliness, Long-Term Relationship(s), M/M, Pride, Running Away, Self-Acceptance, Self-Discovery, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Trans Male Character, Transitioning, Transphobia, a little at the beginning and end, coming of age story, don't worry no one dies, erejean - Freeform, in the closet, suicide note, trans!jean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 13:55:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3490832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/In_agony_and_ecstasy/pseuds/In_agony_and_ecstasy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For as long as Eren has known Jean - even when he knew him as Jeanice - Eren has had feelings for him. He admires Jean from a distance, wondering what makes the books Jean reads in class capture his attention, and desperately hoping to learn from it.</p><p>Eren keeps his distance, until he's confronted with Jean's suicide note on Facebook and the possibility that Jean could die without ever knowing how important he was to Eren.</p><p>Without thinking, Eren sets out to stop Jean before it's too late, and when he does, both their lives change forever in ways Jean could have never dreamed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Life Chose Me

**Author's Note:**

> Bang bang from the closet walls,  
> The schoolhouse halls,  
> The shotgun's loaded.  
> Push me and I'll push back.  
> I'm done asking, I demand.
> 
> From a nation under God,  
> I feel it's love like a cattle prod.  
> Born free, but still they hate.  
> A born me, no I can't change
> 
> It's always darkest just before the dawn.  
> So stay awake with me, let's prove them wrong
> 
> Rise Against - Make It Stop Lyrics 
> 
> Please don't read this if you are sensitive to suicidal related subject matter! This fic is graphic and could be very triggering! Don't read it if you are uncomfortable with blood either!
> 
> Everyone else, thanks for reading!

I stood in the hall, just outside my bathroom, watching Jean. From where I stood, I could hear the scratchy noise his stubble made as his fingers spread shaving cream over his face. He was in his boxers, and his leg hair hugged tightly to his calves and scattered all across his thighs. The stretch marks in the center of his back and near the crevices of his armpits were the purple and faded pink caps of the waves his back muscles made as they rippled. His hair had just been buzzed short again, into an undercut the way he liked it. The hair on top was an ashy blond color faded by the sun, and the buzzed hair around his ears was a pale brown not yet exposed to anything but the gray clouds of winter and spring. 

He began dragging the razor across his face, and I flinched.

Since he was looking in the mirror, and could see me watching behind him, he saw my flinch. “You remember what today is, then.”

“Of course I do.” I’d more likely remember today than I would our anniversary, or my birthday, or what year it was. 

He continued shaving. “You aren’t going to get all weird, are you?”

I swallowed, already feeling the emotion bubbling in my throat. I approached him from behind and wrapped my own brown arms around his pale waist. My fingers ran over his happy trail and then his binder. “Of course I am.”

He sighed theatrically, but made no move to pull my arms off of him as he kept shaving and splashing the razor in the sink water. 

“Gonna have to let it go eventually,” he said, angling his head so that he could get a good look at his sideburns. His golden eyes met my own green ones in the mirror.

“Not today,” I said.

He wiped his face off with faucet water. His face was smooth and soft. As he turned away from the sink to face me, I ran my fingers along his cheeks. I couldn’t believe just a year ago I had been teaching him how to shave.

He wrapped his arms around my waist and bent down to kiss me. 

“Don’t remind Carla, okay?” 

I nodded my head at him. “Can’t promise Mikasa won’t, though.”

He sighed again, but nodded. His kissed me, this time with more passion, before biting his lip. “What do you want to do today?”

As of today, it had been three years. The last two anniversaries of _that_ night we had spent doing whatever Jean wanted, to distract him. But in the last year, something had changed. His body, for one, was starting to mold into what he’d worked so hard for. But his mind too, I knew. He’d come to some resolve in the past year, some closure after three years of internal turmoil with his past. His gaze had hardened, his hands were firm and confident in their motions, and when he smiled now he never looked like he used to, broken and fragile like an injured butterfly that was still trying to heal before it could fly.

When I didn’t answer his question right away, Jean leaned down to kiss me while I thought about it. His lips were sure of themselves against mine. He was strong now, and I was glad for it, because I needed him to be on the days I couldn’t be. Like today. Anything we did today would be to distract _me_ from thoughts of what had happened three years ago.

…

I’d been in my bedroom, most the evening sitting on my beanbag chair, holding a Ps3 controller and playing Infamous. It was Friday, and because it was April, and because it was my last year of high school, and because it was the last few days of spring break, I had been pretty much secluded from the rest of the world for the better part of seven days. I hadn’t hung out with any of my friends, and I’d barely texted anyone either. Even my computer had gone mostly untouched. My Facebook was long forgotten.

Because of this, I didn’t have any idea what was happening just five blocks over from my house.

“Eren!” my sister called from her bedroom. 

I considered ignoring it, as my fingers continued to smash into buttons. My eyes were zeroed in on the game, but she called for me again. I pressed pause.

“What!” I yelled. My bedroom door was open, but hers wasn’t.

“Come here!” 

“Why?”

“Just do it!” she yelled. So I stood and walked up to her bedroom door, contemplating what would be the snarkiest way of telling her she had legs too and if she wanted to talk to me she could walk over to me instead. 

I stepped into her room. “Fucking _what_?”

“You know Jeanice right?” she said, sitting in her office chair and facing her computer screen with her hood up over her long, black hair. 

“Jean? Uh…sorta, yeah. Why?” I asked.

I didn’t know him at all actually, other than that he sat across from me in my English class. Not too long ago he’d cut his hair really short, and he’d started to slowly ease into wearing clothes that weren’t exactly meant for boys, but in any case couldn’t be called girly. Band T-shirts and hoodies mostly. 

The teacher never hassled him – unlike the other students did – because he sat in the corner and he was always reading anyway. His delicate hands were chapped, and usually trembling, as they handled books that were nearly as wrecked as his confidence. Dog-eared and faded – the books I meant, not him. He was neither.

Anyway, the books were always paperback, always being held improperly, with one side of the book being folded behind the other as he read. He usually held a highlighter too, and I wondered what words were important enough that he thought they should be highlighted.

Because I wanted to be those words.

Other than staring at him and wondering what he was reading though, I didn’t know much about him. He never spoke up in class at all. But one time, I had come to class a little early after lunch. Before stepping into the classroom I’d heard voices coming from the other side of the cracked door.

“Does your mom know?” our teacher had asked.

“No, I can’t tell her yet.” I recognized Jeanice’s voice. I almost decided to step away from the door, but couldn’t make myself. I wasn’t too good of a person to not eavesdrop, and anyway, I was desperate to know more about her. 

“But you want me to use male pronouns?” Our teacher had clarified. I didn’t know what that meant, and my eyebrows quirked up in confusion.

“Yeah,” she replied, “And call me Jean.”

“Should I tell the class?” our teacher asked.

“Don’t like – don’t like announce it to the class. I can tell people, but if they call me a girl or try to – to…ya’ know…fuck – screw, uh sorry, screw with me…”

“I should tell them not to.”

“Yeah.”

After that day, it had still taken me a while to understand what he meant, but I had heard him correct people. When people tried to call him Jeanice, he wouldn’t respond until they said Jean. And when a couple of guys started messing with his bra straps the teacher had sent them to the principal’s office. One girl called him a dyke and he tipped over her desk and told her to suck his dick. No one called him a dyke again, or Jeanice, or anything else that would upset him. 

No one talked to him at all actually. They thought he was crazy. They thought he was begging for attention. But I didn’t.

I thought he was brave. He had done what I couldn’t. He’d come out. 

Jeanice was the first “girl” I’d ever liked, after all. And while I’d always been attracted to girls, I had been to guys too. Every crush I’d ever had was on a guy. When I started to have feelings for Jeanice, I’d been so relieved. Liking Jeanice didn’t force me to confront my sexuality.

But liking Jean did, and confronting it wasn’t as scary when it was him. Liking him forced me to confront my sexuality in a way that made me feel like I could do it. Liking Jean was different than liking any of the other guys, because if Jean could do it so could I. Maybe not now, maybe not for a long time, but I knew I could do it because of him. One day, at least. 

But that feeling vanished the second Mikasa swirled around and said, “He just posted his suicide note on Facebook.”

“What?” I yelped, much too loud to pretend I was unaffected.

“Yeah…I hope –” But she couldn’t finish because I was shoving her chair aside so that I could see for myself.

I winced at the screen searching for what I hoped I wouldn’t find. Then I felt my stomach turn inside out.

He had written:

I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to spend tonight thinking about you fucking people. But I realized if I didn’t put this on the internet my mom would find a way to convince everyone it was an accident. 

So, here it goes, I guess.

I’m going to kill myself tonight. I just told my mom I wanted to start transitioning, and I wanted her to start using “he” and “him” and shit to refer to me. She told me that I was sick and that she was going to call a psychologist or something on Monday to get me some help. I kept telling her I’m a guy, and she kept screaming that I wasn’t. No matter how hard I tried to explain to her that I’ve always felt like this, she told me that I couldn’t have. She told me I was a happy girl as a child and she asked me where she went wrong. 

She had the nerve to ask me “What did I do to you to deserve this?”

I tried telling her that she didn’t do anything wrong and that I wasn’t punishing her. I told her it was just who I was. When I said that nothing would change, I’d still be me, just a different body, she said “I’ve lost my daughter.” When I told her that she was gaining a son, she told me “I’d prefer you dead.”

It’s what everyone else has been telling me too. At least once a day someone tells me to “fuck off and die,” or “just kill yourself” and you know what FUCK IT. I’m going to. There’s no point in staying alive if this is what I have to live with.

I hope all of you, and I do mean ALL OF YOU feel like shit the rest of your lives because you know you’re the reason I killed myself. 

And to all of you that told me I’d burn in hell for this, let me make something clear:

If I go to hell, it’s not because I’m trans or because I killed myself. It’s because your God’s the fucked up type of person to think it’s cool to put me in a chick’s body and then put me in a home that hates me and surround me with people that hate me and then blame ME for the shit that happens because of it. 

FUCK ALL OF YOU

That was it. That was the end and my heart stalled. I felt like my chest was caving in. My throat reached for air but my lungs had deflated. 

“When was this posted?” I demanded, in a raspy voice that sounded like I had been choked. 

“Uh…like ten minutes ago?” Mikasa answered. She was leaning forward in her chair, with a worried expression I knew wasn’t meant for Jean but for me. Her eyebrows knitted together as she covered half her face in her scarf.

“I have to go,” I said, turning around and heading toward her door. She stood to follow me.

“Where?”

“I have to stop him.”

She grabbed my harm, holding me in place. She was lucky I didn’t shove her right into the wall.

“You don’t even know her,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll be fine. She won’t do it. She’s just upset right now.”

I pried my arm away from hers and stepped into my bedroom. My hand snatched up my sweatshirt, wallet, phone and keys, all at once where they laid on my bed. “You don’t know that! You don’t – you don’t have any idea how hard –”

And then I cut my words off. She didn’t know I had any idea either. I wasn’t out to her or anyone yet, so they couldn’t know that I had spent nights contemplating whether or not I’d be better off dead too. Whether or not the conditional love I received from my adoptive parents would expire if they found out I was attracted to guys.

“How hard it is for him,” I finally said. 

She squinted at me and her mouth opened, but I was already dashing toward the stairs. She followed me and before I could get out the door she grabbed me again. This whole time all I could think about were the seconds ticking. He lived just a few blocks away, took the same bus I that I had taken for years…but I could get there and it could still be too late. For all I knew, it already was.

“Eren,” Mikasa said, pinning my arm against the front door so I couldn’t leave, “What has –”

I didn’t know what expression I was wearing, but whatever it was – terror, agony, worry, desperation, grief – it made her narrow, gray eyes soften at the corners and her eyebrows turn up. Her hand loosened on me.

“What should I tell mom and dad?” she asked.

“Tell them I ran to get something at the gas station or something.” My words slurred together as I spoke. My whole body was shaking with nerves and the overwhelming urge to sprint. “This – this shouldn’t – can’t be that long. It can’t.”

She nodded and then her hand fell. 

Not even a second later it seemed, my key was in the ignition of my truck.

On my way there, I thought of the three occasions Jean had spoken to me as I sped through stop signs and even lights to get to him on time. 

Once in English class I had been about to ask him about his name. He’d only just started to tell people to call him a guy, and I still wasn’t sure how it worked, but I wanted to know so badly. I wanted to be the one person in the class who got it right. I wanted to stand out to him the way the highlighted words in his books did.

But my heart was thudding so hard my hands were shaking from it. I couldn’t stop tapping my foot or pulling on the collar of my shirt. Every few seconds I turned my head to look at him – we’d been partnered together that day, so I’d sat next to him – and the ability to speak would fall out of my mouth in a single breath. 

Finally he noticed me staring. “What the _fuck_ is your problem, kid?” 

I didn’t speak to him that day. Not after that, I couldn’t. I was too worried I’d fuck things up even more than I already had.

Even now – as I skidded around the corner onto his street – I still blushed when I thought about it. The memory made me want to kick myself in the ass. 

A different time – just after I’d gotten my license and a couple of weeks after my first attempt at speaking to him – I’d noticed him standing in the entryway of our school building. I was just about to head out to my car, but realized all the buses were gone. He’d missed his.

“Hey, uh…hey, dude,” I stammered, blushing as his golden eyes met mine. He leaned against the brick wall, with his hands shoved in his pockets. A book was wedged between his arm and side. “Do you uh…need a ride or something?”

When I said this, his eyebrows shot up, and then almost instantly after his eyes narrowed. “What for?”

“So, ya’ know…you can get home before it’s late,” I replied.

“Are you just asking so you can fuck with me?” 

“Uh…no,” I said, “Your house is on the way is all.”

He bit his lip. “Alright…but I swear if you try anything I’ll fucking wreck you.”

Oh God, please do. Then I shook my head, and wiped my face as if the blush could be rubbed off. “Yeah, okay. Whatever. Just…just come on, then.”

He followed me out to my car and sat in the passenger’s seat. On the ride home he stared out his window and didn’t say anything to me. I asked him if he minded if I turned on the radio and he shook his head. When we reached his street he pointed at the house that was his, and I pulled over.

He opened his door, stepped halfway out, and then paused. His eyes were severe, smoldering for a second, before he turned them to look at me. His features softened. “Why’d you give me a ride home?”

“’Cause you looked like you needed one,” I replied. “Might have been waiting there a while.”

He nodded, and I didn’t want to think about why that was. “That’s it?”

I nodded.

“Well uh…thanks, I guess.”

I had nodded. He stepped out, and I said, “Goodnight, Jean.”

He paused again like his foot had been caught in a trap, to look at me. His eyes had widened just a bit. “Uh…yeah…um, Goodnight… Eren?”

I nodded, secretly thrilled he had remembered my name and trying not to beam at him. 

“Goodnight, Eren,” he repeated. 

Then he shut the door behind him. I stayed parked where I was until I saw him get through his front door. 

My truck screeched against the pavement as I halted to a stop in front of his house. Only then did I realize I had no place being here. I had no excuse for showing up and there was no reason his mom would let me in. 

At least there weren’t any cars in his driveway. No ambulances or cop cars. No firemen with a latter trying to convince him not to jump off his roof. His yard was illuminated by lamplight coming from his living room window. The curtains were drawn. The yard was still, and glistening with the melting snow. 

The third time Jean spoke to me we’d both been in detention. He was in detention for telling Thomas to eat his own ass out when the guy kept calling him Jeanice. 

I was in detention because – well, really I was in detention because I had known Jean had gotten detention and I wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to spend a whole hour after class with him alone – I refused to stop kicking Mina’s seat throughout class and intentionally spilling her Pepsi out onto the carpeting. 

We sat right next to each other in the room. The teacher had asked me to clean up the Pepsi stain, and had asked Jean to clean the whiteboards. Then she’d left and we didn’t have any motivation to actually do it. 

Jean had started the hour by reading, but at some point he’d crossed his arms and tucked his face into his elbow, with his hood pulled over his head. His breath had deepened when he fell asleep.  


His book was still sitting open on his desk. There wasn’t any highlighting on the pages, but I’d seen him highlighting earlier. 

I was torn between doing the right thing and learning what I’d always wanted to know – what did he highlight? – as I stared at the book on his desk for the better part of ten minutes. 

It was useless. I couldn’t possibly stop myself from easing that book right off the desk into my antsy hands. 

My fingers flipped through the pages, finding all the spots he’d highlighted while keeping my thumb on the last page he’d read. The more I read, the more my heart hammered. I’d never read words like this in my life. I wouldn’t have imagined they could get published. It finally occurred to me to read the cover. 

_Two Boys Kissing_ by David Levithan. 

There on the cover were two boys doing exactly what the title suggested. My hands trembled with the shock. I’d never seen something like that before, such a blunt, unapologetic statement on the cover of a book meant for someone my age. Someone like me. My hands felt weak, and the blood in my veins was exhilarated.

Too exhilarated. I dropped the book and it plopped against the floor with a thud. 

Jean’s head jerked up and I froze like a cornered animal. He processed everything like his thoughts were lagging. He first looked at me and arched an eyebrow. Then his gaze sunk toward the floor, where his book had landed.

Then he moved in a flash out of the desk to snatch it up. He glared at me, but the worst part was it was like he thought I was a hunter and he was my prey. I could see his eyes frantically searching for an escape, words he could say or an exit he could take to get himself safely out of this.

“If you tell anyone I swear to God I’ll kick your ass,” he said.

I raised my hands up. “I won’t.”

“I mean it – I –” His fingers gripped onto the book and the edge of his seat like he feared for his life. I wanted to reassure him, put my hand on his shoulder, hold him…anything to make him feel better. But I didn’t, I leaned away from him and kept myself still. 

“Jean. I’m _not_ going to tell anyone. I don’t care what you read. I was just – Okay, I _do_ care what you read. But only ‘cause I see you reading all of the time.”

He stared at me for a minute. His eyes zoomed in on every inch of me, looking for any sign that I was lying. He looked like he’d done this a million times, so many times to so many people, that it was second nature to him. He looked exhausted of not trusting people, but he wouldn’t give in. “Why would you care?”

I shrugged. “I…uh…I don’t know. I just – is it that hard to believe that I’m interested in what you read?”

“Uh, _yeah_.” 

“Well I am. That’s all there is to it. I don’t have a reason, okay? Damn.” Other than liking him, and being unable to do anything but think about him and the stupid books he paid more attention to than me. 

Other than that of course, no reason.

I slumped in my chair and crossed my arms, hoping he wouldn’t see through my façade. 

“Just…no one else is, so…” he replied, and his voice cracked in a way that sort of made my heart crack too. 

“Well I am,” I said, still praying he didn’t look too deeply into why. “I just wanted to see what book you were reading.”

“It’s…It’s not as bad as it looks,” he mumbled. I looked again at the book and then at him. I made sure his eyes met mine as I did. My eyes demanded his gaze.

“It doesn’t look bad at all, man.”

His lip trembled at that, and for a moment his exterior fell like a waterfall and I saw Jean, the real Jean, the one without all the barbed-wired fences surrounding heart. “Really?”

“Yeah. It uh…it looked like a good book.” God, I wished I was better at this sort of thing. I wanted to be as good at reading him as he was at reading books. 

“You’re lying.” His fingers fiddled with the pages though. He held it close to his chest, like the book belonged near his heart.

I shook my head. “I’m not.”

His eyebrows furrowed. His body leaned toward mine, across the aisle between our desks. “Are you –”

But I’d never find out what he was about to say, because the teacher walked back into the classroom and told us that we had ten minutes left of detention and the carpeting and whiteboards better be cleaned by then. 

That was the last time I’d spoken to Jean, and that was over a month ago. I couldn’t possibly convince anyone that opened the door that I was his friend. 

But it had been at least five minutes since I left the house, and probably more like fifteen to twenty since he had posted his suicide note. I couldn’t wait. I jumped out of my car.

My feet trampled over damp grass as I jogged up to their porch. My finger slammed into their doorbell. Five, torturing seconds passed before I decided to pound my fist against their front door. 

There were footsteps shuffling on the other side of the door and then the lock clacked. The doorknob turned.

Jean’s mom stood in the door’s place. Her hazel eyes were blood shot and her round face was as pale as snow, with tear tracks running down her cheeks. Her eyes lashes were wet. She sniffled.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“My name is Eren,” I blurted, “I’m uh…I’m here to…”

And I knew I had to do it. It would taste awful in my mouth, the equivalent of throwing up a sound, but I had to do it. “To see Jeanice.”

“She’s grounded,” his mother said.

I knew of only one thing a parent would let their kid get away with when they were grounded. “We’re actually working on a school project together…It’s uh…it’s due when we get back after break and we haven’t even _started_ this gigantic –”

“Alright, alright,” she sighed, stepping out of the way so I could step in. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and shook her head as she slumped into the nearest couch. Her body went limp as she tipped onto her side and shoved a pillow underneath her head. The TV was on, and the volume was up, but she didn’t appear to be watching it. “She’s in her room. Upstairs.”

“Thank you,” I said, barely taking the time to shut the door behind me as I darted toward the staircase directly ahead of the entryway. 

Once up there I looked for whatever room would have a closed bedroom door, assuming he wouldn’t want his door open, but realized there was just a closed off bathroom at the end of the hall between two bedrooms. Both the bedrooms had open doors. One lacked so much decoration and messiness I knew it must be a guest room, and the other was cluttered with girl’s clothing. It had a ruffled, purple bedspread and silky, purple curtains hanging. It was Jean’s room.

Light escaped from the crack underneath the bathroom door and stretched across the carpeting. 

I crossed the hall in three steps before trying to turn the doorknob. It was locked, so I started knocking on the door. I pressed my ear against it. I couldn’t hear anything. “Jean?” Please answer. 

There was a whimper. Thank God. Thank fucking God. My lungs swelled with air and relief. He was alive. 

“Jean!” I begged. Almost instantly I covered my mouth, afraid my voice had carried down the stairs. “Can you open the door? It’s uh…it’s Eren. From English.”

“What are you doing here?” he whined. I heard water splashing and it made the blood in my body crash right to my toes. What the _fuck_ was he doing in the tub? 

“Jean, please come out,” I pleaded, “I saw your note on Facebook.”

“I can’t come out,” he said. “I’m still bleeding.”

My fist was already slamming against the door. “What did you do?! We have to call 911! Jean you have to come out, please come out!”

“I won’t. Why are you even here? Just leave me alone, my mom will hear you.” There were more sloshing sounds. 

I swallowed the volume of my voice, trying to calm myself, trying to stop my heart from quaking. “I’m here because I don’t want you to do this. Please don’t do this.”

“People keep telling me to die,” he whined. His voice sounded like fabric being torn. 

“Don’t let them win!” I cried, “Think of the people who will miss you!”

“No one will.”

“Of course people will! More people than you think.” Like me. He hardly knew me, and had no reason to suspect that I had cared for him, but I would miss him. No matter how much time would pass, I’d never forget him. 

“Like who?”

I breathed. Telling him I would miss him wasn’t enough. He needed something more, and I realized now was the time to read him the way he read his books. The words I said now needed to be the words he’d highlight in his life. 

“People like you…and um…people like me. People who know what it’s like to end up in a family you don’t belong in because of…because of who you love or…or what you are.” This was the first time in my life I’d ever come out to anyone, and I was using it to beg someone else to stay. This wasn’t how I pictured it, and it hurt worse than I had ever imagined.

And that was no easy feat, considering I’d imagined coming out hundreds of times. Each night before bed and even in my dreams. None of that could compare, because it shouldn’t have to be like this. The closet door shouldn’t have to be opened and closed by those seeking shelter. It shouldn’t have to be such a dangerous, precious, life-or-death situation to open that door, even if it was just for a second. 

I choked on my breath for a moment, trying not to whimper. He needed me to be strong right now. “Those people will be your new family, Jean. You don’t know them yet, or at least not well, but if you died and they found out, they would miss you. They would…they would mourn you because they would have loved you if they had gotten the chance.”

He paused. The water garble and slapped against the porcelain. He sobbed. “No one’s ever going to accept me though. Like…like the _real_ me.”

I thought that was what hurt the most out of it all. How a parent could go from unconditionally loving a child to disowning him in the course of an hour. Parents like that had never loved their child at all, only the idea they had of their child. And I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand how Jean’s mother could have Jean, a boy so vast and complex there was a whole universe expanding behind his irises, and not love him. If not her, I’d gladly spend hours exploring that universe instead. 

“Fuck them, anyway. Anyone who doesn’t accept you doesn’t deserve the time of day, let alone your death. Don’t end it all for them. There’s so much you still have to do. There’s only one of you, Jean. You’re irreplaceable. And you can’t die so young when so little of the world has met you. You can’t let everyone out there miss out on you,” I murmured, placing my hand against the door as if it could be against his heart. 

The words came right from my core. They’d been lying dormant inside me for so long, written on my paper soul just waiting for the day I would need to slip it underneath a bathroom door for him to read. 

“Do you mean that?” he asked. There was a hope in his voice that hadn’t been there. Oh God, I needed him to open the door. I needed him to feel safe enough to open the door. 

“Yes, yes, God, yes!” I blurted, “Of course I do. All of it.”

“My mom hates me. She wants to try to take me to someone who can fix me,” he said.

“Get a new one,” I replied, “I did.” 

He chuckled through a sob. I smiled, despite myself. “What do you mean?” he asked. 

“I mean,” I started, and in the next breath, without my permission, I added, “Come live with me.”

He was silent for a really long time. I started to panic. Was he bleeding out? He had sounded so lucid. “Jean?”

I heard the sloshing again, and the worst mental image of him going unconscious and sinking into the water crept into my thoughts. I pounded on the door again.

But he opened it. He was in nothing but his sweats and a sports bra. His skin was still sopping wet from the water he hadn’t bothered to wipe off with a towel, and I pulled him into my arms. His own hung in the air, unsure whether or not they should hold me back. 

Over his shoulder, I saw the tub. The water was red. My head jerked backward and I took a look at him. His wrists were bleeding everywhere, but even I could see that the cuts weren’t deep enough to kill him. The blood wasn’t squirting. At this point it slowly trailed down his fingers and dripped onto the floor. 

My eyes met his as I pulled his arms into my hands. “It didn’t work,” he said. 

I shook my head at him, my eyes searching his face. “That’s not a bad thing.”

A fragile smile pinched his cheeks. “It’s everywhere.” 

“Don’t worry about it. Just dry off, put Band-aids on your wrists, and pack a bag.”

“You were serious? I can live with you?” His eyes were so wide with hope. I wanted nothing more than to get him the fuck out of here and back home, where I knew he’d be safe. 

I nodded, rapidly. “Yes. Grab everything you need. All your school shit. Some clothes. Everything.”

“What about –”

“I’ll take care of the tub.”

He nodded and reached for a towel off the rack. He first dabbed his body, then wrapped it around his wrists. He darted through the door. 

In the other room, Jean was scurrying around. I heard thumping, and scratching, and zipping as I dropped to my knees on the tile floor. In the cabinet underneath his sink there was another towel, and I used it to wipe the floor clean as best I could, while he scrambled to get his shit together.

That was when his mom came up the stairs. “What are you doing!”

I whipped around on the floor so fast I slipped and almost hit my head on the cabinet. I leapt onto my feet, intending to try to get out of the bathroom and close the door so she wouldn’t see the blood…but it was already too late. The color drained from all of her and she looked like she might fade into nothing. 

“What did you do to my daughter!” she wailed. Her arms flung outward and her heavyset body rocked as she shoved past me to get to Jean’s room. 

I ran in behind her, but almost walked right into her frame. Jean’s mom was staring him down. He stood, fully dressed in sweat pants and a hoodie several sizes too big for him. In his arms he held a gym bag packed so full with shit that it was made of right angles and straining at the zipper. That bag was filled with books, I already knew. He wore his backpack too, and one of his hands gripped onto the shoulder strap. His glared at her like he was made of steel. 

“I’m leaving,” he told her.

She scoffed. “You are not, you’re grounded!” 

“No, mom. I’m _leaving_. You had one fucking job. One job, and that was to love me no matter what. That’s all I’ve ever asked of you and certainly all I’ve ever gotten up until now, and you couldn’t even do that right.”

His face was fierce, like lightening could strike him and it would only make him stronger. His shoulders were broad, his stance wide, and in all my life I couldn’t remember seeing anyone look so courageous. 

“You do not have a daughter. But mom, you never actually _did_. She never existed, so you can’t lose her. But you _can_ lose me. If you don’t want to lose me, I’ll stay. But only if you’ll accept me as a son.”

Jean and I – and the entire world, and all of the universe, and everyone in heaven too – held their breath, waiting for her response.

Her shoulders slumped. Her head ducked. “Leave then.”

We left. 

I brought Jean home. My parents told me he could stay for a few days. I explained to them he wasn’t safe at home, he had nowhere to go. At first they were still hesitant, but when they caught sight of his wrists my mom bandaged him properly and told him she’d already taken in two strays why not a third. 

He shared my bedroom with me. He slept on the futon across the room from my bed. I gave him some of my clothes to wear, and he held them in his hands like they were a childhood teddy bear. “I’ve never had guy’s clothes,” he’d said.

“Now you do. You always will,” I had replied. Sometime after that we got him a few binders and some boxers to go with them. Dressed entirely in guy’s clothes he looked nothing like he used to. He looked like he finally fit right in his skin. 

At school, we were inseparable. Partly because the lash back after he hadn’t committed suicide was so strong from many students, and partly because I was all he had. Other than Mikasa, who had done little more than clarify that Jean was a much better name than Jeanice anyway. She acted as if he’d always been there, and treated him no differently than she did me. If Jean was around her at school, no one dared approach him. 

His suicide attempt was the reason my family had accepted his identity. They may not have known why Jean was the way he was, or what it was called, but they knew a child in need when they saw one. Even Mikasa knew, and she had only ever known him as Jeanice and could remember the days he’d only ever presented as a girl.

They knew whose side they were supposed to be on even if they didn’t exactly understand. Eventually, they had been calling him Jean for so long, and I had been correcting their absentminded use of female pronouns for so long, that they didn’t question it. My mom even told me some time later that she couldn’t think of him as a girl anymore even if she tried.

It wasn’t until six months later though, that Jean woke me up in the middle of the night to crawl into my bed with me. Even in the dark, I could see the galaxies in his irises. “I never even said ‘thank you’,” he whispered. 

He didn’t have to explain what his thank you was for. I already knew. In the darkness, I slid my hand across the sheets so that I could hold his wrist in mine. My thumb trailed across the sensitive scar. “You don’t need to thank me.”

“I don't care. Thank you,” he murmured. In the dark, his cheeks glistened. I pulled him into my arms. 

That night I’d had my first kiss, and a week later we both told my parents we were attracted to men. 

My mom had sighed. “Kind of…anticlimactic in comparison.” This reaction was one I knew I wouldn’t have gotten before bringing Jean home. It would have been much worse, although not on the level Jean’s mom had been. Bringing him home had changed my family – and my entire life – for the better. 

After that I’d never looked back –

…

– Until the anniversary, each year later. 

Jean’s lips pulled away from mine. His thumbs trailed across my cheeks to wipe away any evidence of my tears’ paths. Both his wrists were in my periphery. His scars were part of his skin now, pale and faded like he’d been born with them. I clasped his wrists in my hands.

“Are you done being weird?” he asked, his eyes meeting mine so that I could dive into them. They possessed a future that was so different from his past, with so many different possibilities and choices to be made. In the years since I’d told him that there were people waiting to love him, I had come to love him the most out of everyone. 

“Not yet,” I choked.

He smiled, a crooked grin that made his eyes squint up. He pressed my back into the hallway wall, and tugged me by my waist into his chest. 

I didn’t say anything else after that. I couldn’t make another coherent sound. I kissed him until I knew the only thing I would remember about being in the hallway tomorrow was the stumbling to our bed and the different trails his lips left along my neck on the way there.


End file.
